EDITORIAL, Chicago Tribune: The shutdown is a national embarrassment

Chicago Tribune editorial board

Saturday

Jan 19, 2019 at 2:01 AM

Friday brought Day 28 of the partial government shutdown, the longest such stoppage on record. Blame both President Donald Trump and the congressional Democrats for choosing stubbornness over compromise. These shutdowns get more respect than they deserve -- they’re mutual failures of governance.

There have been 20 previous times since the mid-1970s when the president and Congress failed to reach a spending agreement, resulting in either furloughs or suspended paychecks for some federal workers.

That’s embarrassing. There’s no more fundamental responsibility of elected officials than keeping the lights on. And no more sacred duty of any employer than assuring payroll gets distributed on time. Government shutdowns exist in theory as a prod to budget negotiators. But once the deadline passes, the players should stop strutting and strike a deal.

You know the politics: Trump wants a wall on the southern border to prevent immigrants from entering the United States without permission. He’s defined his presidency as a quest to build the wall, without ever holding to specifics about what it would look like. Yet he demands $5.7 billion in wall financing or he’ll allow the government to stay partially shuttered. Democrats, sensing Trump’s political weakness, refuse to budge on their stance that the wall is immoral.

OK, if a border barrier is immoral, what’s a shutdown? Unethical. There are 800,000 federal employees hit by the shutdown, about evenly divided between those at home without pay and those on the job but not receiving their paychecks. Among the employees reporting for duty each day but worried about paying the rent are air traffic controllers and airport security workers employed by the Transportation Security Administration. While those TSA employees are required to work, the absentee rate is rising, which has led to checkpoints being closed at some airports.

Both sides have boxed themselves in. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is waiting out Trump, hoping he’ll crack. She doesn’t want to lose the first battle of her second tenure in leadership. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell isn’t trying to corral Republicans because he sees no proposal Trump would endorse. On Monday the president turned down a suggestion to reopen the government for a three-week negotiating period. “I’m not looking to call a national emergency,” Trump said, repeating a draconian threat. “This is so simple you shouldn’t have to.”

He’s right. It shouldn’t be this hard. There are solutions to craft, including one we endorsed last week that would see money for Trump’s wall (or “border security,” if you’re a Democrat), in exchange for an agreement to maintain the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for the thousands of young immigrants known as Dreamers.

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